


on sleepless roads the sleepless go

by starlight_sugar



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Post-Mission: Impossible III
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 06:51:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15966986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: This is what Lindsey Farris remembers before she dies. (In which Ethan can see ghosts, and Lindsey gets to say goodbye.)





	on sleepless roads the sleepless go

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fanwork not at all affiliated with the M:I franchise.
> 
> This fic was written for the prompt "au: supernatural" on my Trope Bingo Round 11 card. The title comes from [Hear You Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95jkCdOeIy0) by Jimmy Eat World.
> 
> This story deals with the aftermath of canonical character death, and themes of grief/death. Tread with caution, as needed.

This is what Lindsey Farris remembers before she dies.

She remembers how much it hurts. It’s like a splitting headache, with emphasis on the splitting: there’s something inside her brain radiating outward, jagged spikes pulsing at random, pushing outward and never pulling back. The stabs are like needles, then bullets, then knives. It’s like nothing she’s ever felt before and it keeps going, and going, and going.

She remembers Ethan’s hands hovering near her. She’s aware of the other agents, two she’s never met and then Stickell piloting. There’s something about a defibrillator and she’s trying to listen, she’s been trained to pay attention even when she’s hurting, but the training never hurt like this. It was never inside her, lighting her brain on fire.

She knows that she has done what she can. She tried to warn Ethan about Brassel, she tried to stop Davian, she tried, she’s trying. She’s trying, and-

The last thing Lindsey knows, with gut-wrenching certainty, is that she won’t die alone.

 

#

 

She didn’t want to be a secret agent - what little girl dreams of being a secret agent? She went to school for German, headed up her university’s Jewish student group, took ballet until she was halfway through her twenties. Her father called her Lily and her mother passed down family recipes that had survived improbable odds.

These are the things that she doesn’t talk about at the IMF, because the IMF doesn’t exactly care who you were. They care about how fast you learn, and how convincingly you lie, and how hard you can throw a punch. Lindsey worked for an insurance company in Germany that gets contracted to translate something, and she didn’t find out that she was working for the bad guys until a couple of IMF agents tried to interrogate her about it. She’d given them information, and in exchange they offered her a job.

She’s Agent Farris there, and she’s Ethan Hunt’s prize trainee, and she’s smart, and she’s good. She writes letters to her parents to be delivered upon her death and she keeps going, because that’s what agents do. Nobody at the IMF calls her Lily. She wouldn’t ask them to.

 

#

 

It still hurts, is the thing. She’s not sure how long it is when she realizes that she can feel the pain again, like the detonator never went off. It’s sharp and screeching through her mind and she doesn’t have a brain or hands to lift to cradle her head but it hurts, it hurts and she tries to take a breath and the pain crystallizes, all at once, and then explodes into nothingness.

“Lindsey,” says Ethan.

She wants to gasp or reach out but she can’t. In fact, she’s not altogether sure that she can breathe.

“Lindsey,” Ethan repeats, “look around.”

She looks around. She’s in a hotel room - not American, judging by the decoration and the view and the writing she can see. Chinese, then. Nice, high-end, very expensive. It’s dark out, the kind of dark that could mean the sun went down forty minutes ago or that it’s twenty minutes away from coming back up. Ethan isn’t alone in the hotel bed, but the woman he’s with is asleep.

Lindsey looks back at Ethan, who meets her eyes calmly. Eyes. Does she have eyes? She opens her mouth to ask and supposes that means she must have a mouth now. “What’s happening?”

“You died,” Ethan says. It’s not unkind, but it’s certainly not gentle. Lindsey tries to take a step back and realizes that she can’t feel the ground beneath her. “The detonator in your head went off.”

“Oh,” Lindsey says. The wind rushes deafeningly past the room. “How long ago?”

“A few days.”

“So I’m… a ghost.”

Ethan grimaces. “Yeah.”

“And you can talk to me.”

“It won’t last long,” he says sympathetically. “You’re going to be gone soon.”

A chill goes up and down Lindsey’s… not spine, probably, but whatever the closest thing a ghost has is. “Gone?”

“I don’t know where.”

“How long have you been able to do this?”

“As long as I can remember, but not consistently.” He pauses. “Not everyone becomes a ghost.”

Lindsey closes her eyes for a second. She knows the urban legend that is Agent Hunt in Prague. She knows that his whole team died. She knows that that kind of casualty isn’t unusual, in their line of work. “This happens to you a lot.”

“Yes,” Ethan says, barely above a whisper. The woman in bed with him shifts, and one of his hands gravitates towards her shoulder and begins rubbing circles in, slow and gentle. She murmurs something that sounds like sleep nonsense, and the vaguest smile darts across Ethan’s lips for a second before he focuses back on Lindsey. “You’ll probably be gone within a few minutes. Maybe half an hour, at most.”

“Who is she?” Lindsey asks, before she can help herself. She worked with Ethan for months in training, everyone did, and he’d been as tight-lipped about his personal life as any agent. The most that she’d gotten out of him was that he liked rock-climbing for fun, and that he was born in Wisconsin. He’d never mentioned anything about a girlfriend, let alone the wedding rings sitting together on the nightstand.

Ethan tugs the woman closer to him, almost reflexively. “Julia. My wife.”

She lets herself move - float? walk? - closer towards Ethan. “How long have you been married?”

“Couple of days.” Ethan smiles down at Julia, actually smiles, and Lindsey wants to smile back, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the sleeping woman. She has cuts on her face and she looks not just asleep but unconscious, like she couldn’t wake up even if she wanted to. “It was a spur of the moment thing.”

“Congratulations,” Lindsey says, even though it feels wrong, somehow. It’s too awkward in her mouth, too big, not right for this moment. “Ethan?”

He looks back at her, and she can see how tired he looks now. She wonders why he’s not sleeping. Maybe it’s because of her. Maybe it’s because of his wife. “Yeah, Lindsey?”

“You know it’s not your fault that I died, right?”

“I know,” Ethan says swiftly. It’d be good if she couldn’t tell how long he’d practiced it. Maybe he didn’t practice it for her sake - if the picture of events she has in her head is right, he probably hasn’t had much time to sit around and perfect a lie - but it’s still not genuine. Not quite.

“You signed off on putting me in the field because I’m competent,” Lindsey reminds him. She wants to sit on the bed, maybe put her hand over his, but she’s not sure she can touch him. She’s not sure if he can see a physical body or just a hovering shimmer in the air, or maybe something in between. “And I am competent. Was competent.”

“You were.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Ethan sighs and tips his head back against the headboard to his bed. “It’s not,” he says, “but it’s also going to feel like it, for a little while.”

“You tried to save me.”

“You tried to warn me. It wasn’t Brassel, by the way, it was Musgrave framing him.”

“Damn,” Lindsey mutters.

Ethan shrugs. “I thought it was Brassel too. You would’ve figured it out, if-”

“If I hadn’t died doing my job,” Lindsey says quietly. “Which I signed on for intentionally, as an adult, and sought out and knew the risks of.”

Ethan’s lips quirk into a smile. “You really want to take responsibility for this, huh?”

“I didn’t die alone,” she says before she can stop herself. Ethan’s brows draw together, but she forces herself to keep going. “That’s more than a lot of agents get, and we both know it. I thought that Davian was going to kill me and I was going to die alone in that compound, and instead I died with you, and with other agents. The least you can do is let me accept responsibility for being there in the first place.”

Ethan settles back in his bed. His hand is still making small, slow circles against Julia’s shoulders. He looks less like an agent than Lindsey has ever seen. Just like a man who’s had a hell of a past few days.

“Do you have anything you want me to do?” he asks, after a couple of minutes of quiet. Lindsey starts, and he clarifies, “People you want me to say goodbye to.”

“I wrote the standard-”

“Yeah, everyone writes the standard goodbye letters.” Ethan shrugs. “Dear Mom and Dad, I started feeling sick during my job abroad that I’m nice and vague about, and I’m worried I’m not getting better, and I want to say goodbye. What do your parents think you do, anyways?”

“An actuary in Germany,” Lindsey answers. Her throat feels dry. “The IMF is going to redact those letters.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“I have two more stored in a safety deposit box in DC, ones that tell them the truth. But you don’t need to do anything about those. Agent Wilson from NEST is going to send them.”

“Wilson,” Ethan repeats. “Kennedy Wilson? I didn’t realize you two were close.”

“Yeah. She was…” Lindsey feels her gaze drifting towards Ethan’s sleeping wife, can’t help it. “She has a letter of her own waiting for her.”

Ethan, graciously, doesn’t ask any more questions. Lindsey’s not sure she could answer questions right now. “Do you have any other unfinished business?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You can stay here, if you’d like.”

Lindsey goes to nod, then pauses. “What do I look like to you right now?”

Ethan’s eyes narrow in consideration, scanning her body up and down. “I can tell it’s you,” he says at last, “but it doesn’t look like you’re just standing in front of me. You have a body, but it’s not your body.”

“And I’ll be gone soon.” She can feel it, although she’s not sure exactly what she can feel. It’s almost like she can feel herself trailing away like smoke. Like her fingertips have crumbled to ash and she’s sure her wrists will follow soon. “Tell Kenz I’m sorry. She’ll already know, she might not want to talk to you, but she’ll need to hear it out loud.”

“I’ll tell her,” Ethan says. He’s not rubbing circles into Julia’s shoulder anymore. Instead he’s staring at Lindsey intently - or maybe he’s staring through her. “I promise.”

But now it’s like the floodgates are open, and she can’t stop. “You don’t have to go to my funeral, my real one with my parents, but she probably will, and she might need someone to go with. But they’ll probably make you go to the IMF one, and you can tell whatever stories you want about me, but I want you to know that I’m fluent in German, and that Kennedy is allowed to tell that story about my bat mitzvah, if she wants to. And she’s probably going to try and sit shiva, but she won’t tell anyone, so you can tell the other trainees from my class to do it with her, because they’ll do it, we made a pact about it. And my dad called me Lily, when I was a kid, and it was embarrassing, but I want people to know. I want them to remember me, not just Agent Farris.”

“They will,” Ethan says. He looks devastated but poised, like a statue with cracks across a base that just won’t crumble. “You will be remembered, Lindsey. Not as a sacrifice, but as a person.”

“Okay,” Lindsey says. The absence has crept from fingers and toes up to elbows and knees, and she can feel herself dissolving, or fading, or whatever the right abstract word is for ceasing to exist. “And I want you to know that I could’ve become an agent without you training me, and pushing me, and backing me every step of the way. But I’m glad that I didn’t have to.”

“I’m proud of you, Lindsey.” Ethan takes a deep breath and she almost doesn’t hear the way it catches in his chest. “You made me so proud.”

“I’m afraid,” she says, because there’s nothing else to say.

Ethan smiles and Lindsey wants to cry at the sight of it. “I know.”

“I’m afraid,” she says again, “but I’m not.” It’s moving faster now and it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt and she’s going to be gone soon.

There is one tear on Ethan’s cheek. He doesn’t make a sound but he watches her, without blinking. It’s the last thing she knows: Ethan Hunt’s eyes on her, through her, watching her with a silent, steady respect. It’s the last thing she knows, and then -

\-- and then-

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr or Twitter at @waveridden, as well as on Dreamwidth @harshlights.


End file.
